


let's take us to the grave

by Authoress



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: M/M, but it kind of is, fun and friendly adventure for the whole family, gon and killua explore the catacombs!, i used capitalization i promise, i've never been able to write a good gon, inspired by bastille's 'skulls' and my own restlessness, kurapika uses he/they pronouns, only a troubled one, the death isn't exactly the point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 07:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3438248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Authoress/pseuds/Authoress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>i hope you can make me laugh, six feet down when we're bored of each other</i>
</p><p>(gon does laugh and smile, but it's not exactly what killua imagined it would be)</p>
            </blockquote>





	let's take us to the grave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flintlock (yukine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yukine/gifts).



> okay so this is also a gift for flint and emi, twitsquad's own gon and killua, who thought it'd be great for me to write them a deathfic, sick fucks.

"Careful, careful. That step's an awfully big one."  
  
"I know that! ...You don't have to baby me so much, sheesh."  
  
"Heh, whatever you say, Killua. Watch out now, I'm going to light it up."  
  
The faint crackle and jump of electricity between Killua's fingers fizzles out just as Gon whispers his near-sacred words _first comes rock..._ and then there's a flicker above his pointer finger at the _paper!_ —a tiny ball of flame jumping and hovering in the air like a candle flame. Gon grins at Killua, raising an eyebrow. "Isn't it neat, Killua?"  
  
Killua rolls his eyes and brushes past Gon. "You're gonna waste your Nen, idiot. You know how much it takes out of you when you use your Emitter ability."  
  
Gon pouts but follows behind Killua, waving his hand back and forth between the walls of the passage. His mouth moves in varied _ooo’s_ and _ahhh’s_ at the rough, crumbling hallway while Killua does his best to ignore Gon's excitement in such a dim place. Killua's eyes spark and flash and then he's using Gyo, navigating the darkness ahead with ease while Gon entertains himself.  
  
"Dirt above and dirt below," he hums in a sing-song voice. "Dirt on one side and dirt on the other. Forward, forward! We could get buried alive like this…"  
  
"Would you quit it!" Killua hisses. "This place has me on edge enough as it is."  
  
Gon tilts his head, confused. "Why? It's just compact earth. We could always break out if it came caving down around us."  
  
Killua's skin prickles and he feels the mildest stirrings of nausea. Easy for Gon to say. Gon who was born and raised of the earth, built of clay like the first man, one with nature—invincible. Of course Gon would not die here or fear this place. He smelled of moss and clean rain when he slept, peaceful as the stones on mountaintops, unmovable and undisturbed. He smelled of spilt sap and chopped wood when he was up and excited, smile and touch warming Killua's mile-high storm skin, icy to the touch. And then sometimes, he smelled like burning pine, sharp and cloying, a thick smoke that got into Killua's lungs when he wasn't paying attention, dangerous, because a Gon that used Nen was dangerous, _so fucking dangerous..._  
  
"Killua?"  
  
Gon's voice shocks Killua from his mess of thought. His breath is quick and he has stopped walking and _god_ if he doesn't know the sign of a panic attack when he sees one, had had so many since Gon...since NGL. He swallows tightly and closes his eyes because he said he would be better than this, be stronger than this. He wasn't enough for Gon until it was too late last time, but that will _never_ happen again. He will be their strength. He _will_.  
  
Gon's fingertips tickle his palm as Gon slides their hands together, threading their fingers and grasping Killua's hand tightly.  
  
"We're together now," he says, unusually soft. "I won't let any silly dirt fall on you—we're strong enough to beat anything together. And I'm practically one with the earth, anyway!"  
  
"No," Killua argues. "You're the sun." _And I'm just a satellite in orbit around you, pulled in by your gravity, regardless of how I try and run, try and get away from you and save myself._  
  
That's not a smile Killua wants to see on Gon's face, but it's there anyway, dark and distant. "I'm not the sun, Killua. Not anymore at least. I don't burn hot enough."  
  
 _(And you know what happens to stars when they die.)_  
  
(They explode.)  
  
Killua squeezes his hand back. "They're just demons of the mind. If we try hard enough maybe they can just be shadows."  
  
Gon brightens, just a bit. "Face them together?"  
  
"If you want."  
  
Gon stands beside Killua, fizzling ball of fire at his fingertips throwing frightening shadows onto the walls with every chirp of excitement or upward curl of his lips. But they're nothing more than that, shadows, and Killua does not fear.  
  
"Why are there so many skulls in the walls, Killua?" Gon asks curiously, halting their progress with a tug at Killua's hand. He waves his free hand in front of the jagged lines and columns of skulls practically melded into the walls of the passage. They're small and large, deformed and flawless, decomposing with maggots wriggling in the eye sockets and bleached white and glaringly bright. Some almost look animalistic.  
  
"We're in a catacomb of some kind," Killua replies. "The dead are buried here. We should tread carefully."  
  
"Hmmm," Gon replies thoughtfully, allowing Killua to drag him away.  
  
The panic doesn't settle in until they've been walking so long even Killua's feet ache, taking twists and turns at random, aiming for any path that seemed to slope upwards at the crossroads. Gon lets Killua lead even though his instincts should have been better in the first place, but he doesn’t get mad when every upwards path eventually reverses and delves deeper into the cavernous hollows of the catacombs. _Maybe it’ll be the next one_ , he says with a shrug, fearless and unhurried. Killua is so afraid, though. There’s something more to the stale, heavy air and the slight dampness of every surface that sets his nerves alight and leaves him one edge.

“We’re lost,” he mumbles, after one too many wrong turns. How deep are they now? They just keep digging deeper and deeper, and even though there’s plenty of oxygen thus far, Killua can’t shake the feeling that each rapid pant is sucking more and more of the life from the tunnels. He doesn’t want to die here, underground and hidden from the light of the sun. He _needs_ the sun, has always needed the sun to guide and to heal him, and without it—

“This way,” Gon says, sniffing the air delicately. “There’s something familiar this way.”

Killua's shoulders slump in relief. _Thank god._

This passageway objectively seems no different from the last hundred, but Killua walks lighter now that Gon has a scent trail and they have some kind of lead to escape. The walls aren’t the same sandy brown, either. They’re a kind of red clay, warming the passage with their coloration and calming Killua's heartrate down. Gon throws him a hopeful smile and Killua really starts to believe that yeah, they might actually make it out of here, when they come across Kurapika’s bloodied, tattered corpse sprawled across their path.

Neither of them scream. They just freeze, staring blankly at their friend in disbelief.

There’s a sign of a struggle. Some of the slashes across his arms, shoulders, face, legs… _everywhere_ …are superficial. Some look like they were narrowly avoided. And then there’s the dark, almost purple patch of blood soaking through Kurapika's clothes to form a thick, long coalesced puddle of red-brown blood, hemorrhaged from their wound. There’s no chance that they’re alive. This battle went down far too long ago for either of them to save him.

But what really, really gets to Gon and Killua is not his death—with Kurapika’s quest as dangerous and reckless as it was, that possibility was a gloomy and inevitable certainty—but the cleanly gouged eye sockets where his lurid, red Kurta eyes had once been held. The last of the Kurtas had been slain. And his killer hadn’t even given them the respect of keeping their eyes.

Gon, surprisingly, still doesn’t flinch. Killua has to swallow again, a faint but very real sense of mourning settling behind his eyes. Kurapika wasn’t as close to Killua as they were to Gon and Leorio, but he had held a great deal of respect for the warrior. And they were friends—good friends.

Gon laughs.

It’s not pretty; it’s jarring and ragged and pained and broken. Killua looks at him with something akin to worry and uneasiness at the volume of Gon's hysteria, ricocheting up and down the skull-lined hallways, loud enough to wake the dead, their shadows flickering maliciously in the light from Gon's Nen. They had been quiet enough, venturing down the passages, but now Killua can feel the earth shift and ceiling dust fall and dead men turn in their graves, and he panics.

“Shhh! Shut up Gon, please, please be quiet, you’ll disturb—”

“It’s familiar,” Gon cuts him off. “This smell is so familiar, but I can’t tell if it’s the honeysuckle and steel of Kurapika or the iron and sharp of the blood, god, there’s _so much blood_ …” He hiccups and doubles over, laughter breaking down into coughing. Killua is close to him in a second, calmly ordering him to breathe easier, but Gon is okay. He shudders from shoulders to toes once, then straightens up. “Regardless, we have to move on.”

Killua sputters. “But Kurapika…we don’t even know what happened to him. We don’t know the killer or the motive or where his _eyes_ are! We should at least move their body to the side or bury them or something!”

“What would you have us do, Killua?” Gon asks softly. “We can’t take him with us, there’s nowhere to lay him to rest, and the only way the killer could have gone is forward. Come on, we have to find them.”

Killua reluctantly lets himself be pulled towards Kurapika’s corpse, still fresh without any rot despite the time of death being quite a while ago. Killua doesn’t like looking too long into Kurapika’s empty eyes—it’s almost like he can see even more in death. Gon steps lightly over their legs, and Killua tenses, still feeling that at any moment, Kurapika would stir to life, either as a joke taken too far or as one of the undead brought back by Gon's ruckus.

Killua himself leaps frantically past Kurapika, heart in his throat. He doesn’t look back, even as Gon does, the ache in his soul reflected across his expression. It’s Killua who has to pull him away from their friend.

It’s not as surprising when they come across Leorio.

He’s half crucified to a wall curiously devoid of skulls, left arm and torso drooping against the thick metal spears holding him in place. Other than that, he looks completely normal. His suit isn’t even that ripped up or bled on, just where the spears pierce him. To Killua, it looks like his death was longer and more pained. Yet, like Kurapika, his expression is peaceful enough that he might as well have been sleeping. _Smells clean and inoffensive, like the tile of a hospital floor or fresh laundry,_ Gon adds.

“Something’s wrong,” Killua notes hollowly. “This isn’t right. This can’t be reality. They—they haven’t even been on the same _continent_ in _months_ , how could they both turn up here? …Something’s wrong. Reality is fucked up, or someone’s messing with our brains, but this isn’t _right_.”

Gon looks worried. He nods after a moment. “I hope you’re right, Killua. I really, really do.”

They move on quicker, this time with a desperation that sets them at a jog. This tunnel has yet to have any forks, which could either mean they’re going the right way or they’re running headlong into a trap. Killua doesn’t care anymore what the outcome is. He just wants answers, wants to get out, and the only way to do that is to go forwards. Who will they see next, he wonders. Zushi or Wing? Knuckle or Shoot? Kite or Palm? Perhaps someone more personal, a family member. Ging? …Mito-san?

The answer is none of these. The answer is a dark, empty doorway leading into a room that even Gon's Nen can’t light up.

Killua can’t sense any aura coming from the room, but Gon breaks into a cold sweat and backs away from it. Killua eyes him with concern. “What’s wrong? What do you sense?”

Gon shakes his head, slow and horrified. “No no _no **no**_ …Killua, no, we can’t go in there. It’s wrong, it’s _all_ wrong, we’re not supposed to be here, we need to _leave_ —”

Killua grabs him by the shoulders, stilling the shaking that gripped his entire body. “What’s so wrong, Gon? Tell me what’s happening!”

But before Gon can answer him, Killua smells it. The scent of lightning lingering in the air, the sharp of ozone as electricity jumped and sparked. He might not have known steel and tile like the back of his hand, but Killua knows the acrid, dangerous scent of his own aura. It’s permeating from that hidden doorway, calling to him even as Gon shakes his head more rapidly, grabbing at Killua even though Killua won’t look at him.

“Killua,” Gon whimpers, soft and pleading. “Please not that one. Please don’t go that way. I don’t want you to see it.”

 _What am I going to see, Gon? I’m here, I’m here. My body is here, it’s not over there. I’m not like they were, I’m alive._ But still the scent hung heavy in the air, taunting him.

 _Was_ he really here?

Despite Gon's pleas, Killua takes small steps forward, entering the darkness of the room with caution and fear. He’s prepared for anything—any kind of dismemberment or brutality to his doppelganger, so he thinks. It takes a while for even his Gyo to adjust in the thick darkness, but when it does, he finds he is utterly and completely unprepared for what he sees.

True, his body is lying there, across the room, turned away from him so that he cannot see his face or any damage to front of his body, but that was expected. What he didn’t expect to see was Gon's body as well, still very much alive and standing, fists clenched and shoulders pulled taut, turned into the other corner. His Nen pools and swirls around him, murky with rage and inner darkness like it did with Pitou. Killua's stomach drops down and away from him. _Gon had lost control again? But…_

“Do you understand now?” Gon asks from behind him, tired and miserable. Killua jumps and whips around to face the Gon he thought he knew, mouth working but no sounds coming out.

“Understand?” He finally blurts. “No, of course I don’t _understand_ ; why are there two of us?”

“None of this is real,” Gon says quietly. “I had hoped the illusion would last longer, though. But you knew something was off, all along.”

“You lost control again?” Killua asks softly and receives a nod in reply. “But I would have helped you. I would have _tried_.”

“You did,” Gon agrees with a sad smile, gesturing to Killua's second body. “And you paid for your loyalty to me how I hoped you never would. I’ve been keeping you here, tied to this world, just for a little while.”

Killua's blood goes cold. _Then that would mean…_

Killua was wrong—Gon wasn’t the sun, he never was the sun. Gon was the earth, broad and all-encompassing, enough to stretch from one horizon to the next and take over his whole life, so that Killua couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been with Gon. No matter how far Killua ran, he would never be able to escape Gon. And under that skin, under the friend Killua had made and loved, were the catacombs of guilt and betrayal and darkness that infected the green love and life of Gon's being, turning him sick and twisted.

These catacombs held all the lives Gon had ever touched—and destroyed. And at the heart of the tunnels—the core of the earth—was Killua, suspended from death by the will of his everything.

“You’re not perfect,” Killua swallows, blinking back tears, “I always knew that. And I accept it. It doesn’t matter whose fault this whole mess is—you’re here now, aren’t you? And I’m here. There’s only one place to go.”

Gon reaches out his hand tentatively and Killua takes it, grasping it tightly. “You don’t forgive me,” Gon whispers, fighting back tears of his own, “But you’ll still go with me?”

“You’re not the sun,” Killua acknowledges. “But you’re _my_ sun, the light that saved me and dragged me from the pit of despair and loneliness that was my life as an assassin. I owe you my life, Gon. And when it comes down to it, we’re best friends, aren’t we?”

Gon smiles shakily. “Yeah. Yeah, we are.”

Killua pulls Gon closer to him, into a tight hug, before releasing him. “If it’s the end, we’ll go together.”

Gon tightens his grip around Killua's hand. “Together.”

The catacombs fall in and around them to the beating of two hearts as one.

**Author's Note:**

> ask me about the symbolism of everyone's deaths i actually put thought into it


End file.
